• NicEdit
• TinyMCE

Whilst a decision on which editor is the best for you’re project depends entirely on your own circumstances. I am only focusing on these two for now and don’t claim to be a master on either.

Downloading

There’s one thing that bugs me about the process of downloading NicEdit. It smells of the Mootools Javascript framework for one particular reason. There’s a range of additional extras and packages that are included in the download. The problem is that if you need to download it again for any reason. How can you be sure you include everything that you need?

I much prefer the editor to arrive as a complete core package, rather than it being a combination of various features. I feel that TinyMCE make it easier for you by offering the whole lot, even with a version designed entirely for the JQuery javascript framework.

Size

Looking at the downloads for each editor, I was impressed with NicEdit for having on single JS file and and sprite image for the buttons. Since CodeIgniter is super trim and lightweight, it immediately felt like the right thing to use. Some say that a full blown template library like smarty is overkill for CodeIgniter. I use smarty all the time in CodeIgniter, as such, perhaps TinyMCE is an acceptable size. Also, the TinyMCE folder structure includes a designated plugins directory. Which brings me onto my next topic.

Plugins

It’s clear for every developer that every wysiwyg editor needs to be customisable so it can meet its technical or design requirements. So the main questions are which offers the easiest integration and which offer the most power. I am afraid to confess that I have not written a plugin for TinyMCE yet so cannot comment on how it works out for that. However, I have been able to extend NicEdit quite easily. It’s possible to override the data that’s provided to buttons. For instance I have supplied my editor with a tree of available links and a library of images to choose from. I could post the code if the interest is there.

Documentation

There’s a wiki and a small section of demonstrations for NicEdit. The wiki includes some information about how to interact with it using plugins. But the content is limited. On the contrary, the TinyMCE api documentation is fantastic. I think those two points were the deciding factors in which wysiwyg to use for my CodeIgniter project. I wanted to pick it up and run with it. It felt like I could get everything done quicker using NicEdit as it was easier to digest. And thankfully. it all worked straight away.

Conclusion

I am yet to determine if it’s possible to isolate the cursor position within the content. That would be helpful for a range of tasks, like image insertion from an alternative source. I am happy with using NicEdit for now, it suites my needs. However, I am really worried that I will need a feature that it does not support. Even worse, it does, but was not downloaded with the package included.